The Pursuit of Harpyness » Gay Rightshttp://www.harpyness.com
As narrated by the most charming and vicious women on the internetSat, 29 Sep 2012 11:37:30 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.8.5Good News from Elsewhere on the Globehttp://www.harpyness.com/2010/05/26/good-news-from-elsewhere-on-the-globe/
http://www.harpyness.com/2010/05/26/good-news-from-elsewhere-on-the-globe/#commentsWed, 26 May 2010 15:00:52 +0000http://www.harpyness.com/?p=15615Time forbids me from rattling on today, but there are two stories that you should know about, if you don’t already.

First up is from Trinidad and Tobago: on Monday, national elections there resulted in a new prime minister for the Caribbean island nation. A lady prime minister: Former Attorney General Kamla Persad-Bissessar.

The previous prime minister, Patrick Manning, was facing a vote of no confidence for his mishandling of funds and rumors of corruption. Persad-Bissessar ran on a reform platform, and her United National Congress coalition won a huge proportion of parliamentary seats. In her acceptance speech, Persad-Bissessar said

Because of you we now stand on the cusp of a great moment in our history, one in which we begin the task of bringing people together to rebuild Trinidad and Tobago to make it safer, cleaner, more truly progressive than it has ever been before.

Across the pond, Portugal has become the sixth European nation to legalize gay marriage. The president, Anibal Cavaco Silva is a conservative catholic and no fan of gay marriage, but chose to end the debate by ratifying the parliamentary bill, saying

I feel I should not contribute to a pointless extension of this debate, which would only serve to deepen the divisions between the Portuguese and divert the attention of politicians away from the grave problems affecting us.

Notably, the Portuguese bill doesn’t provide for separate but equal “marriage,” rather it simply removes any reference to gender in the already standing marriage laws of the nation.

Sunday will mark the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City that are widely considered to be the catalyst of the modern American gay rights movement. In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, police raided the popular Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village — a regular occurrence, as gay bars were an easy target for police shakedowns. Many patrons of these bars were anxious to keep their sexuality secret and would risk arrest on indecency charges if they were present during a raid, hence ensuring regular payoffs for corrupt police officers. The Stonewall raid began like any other, and this time the official reason for the police action was the illegal sale of alcohol. (One of many smokescreens employed to facilitate the raids.) The ubiquity of these kinds of police actions were marvelously demonstrated in the opening montage of the film Milk, where news clips and newspaper articles detailing arrests for “deviant” behavior show just how real the threat was of being subjected to criminal punishment simply for being gay, even in that reputedly most liberal of cities, New York. But this time, the raid did not go as scheduled. This time, the LGBT community fought back.

The gay rights movement in America before the riots was very low-key. The only association with any kind of influence was the Mattachine Society formed in 1950; they staged a “sip-in” at New York City bars to protest refusal of service to homosexual patrons. However, Mattachine was dedicated almost exclusively to the rights of white, upper-middle class gay men, and, in contrast to later out-and-proud organizations, its members frequently conducted business under aliases. The San Francisco-based Daughters of Bilitis, founded in 1955, was the most organized group that worked on behalf of lesbians; DOB was founded by Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin (Martin died last year, soon after marrying Lyon after decades spent together and before the passage of Proposition 8). Both Mattachine and DOB used conservative tactics and eschewed the more radical elements of the LGBT community that came to prominence following Stonewall.

The activist landscape changed irrevocably in 1969, when the Stonewall raid devolved into a riot. While patrons of the Stonewall Inn were being hauled out for arrest, ripples of resistance started to spread. The patrons targeted for arrest were frequently “butch” lesbians and drag queens, while the more “respectable” looking individuals were often left alone. None of this was new, but this raid was the final straw. There have been attempts of varying plausibility to explain why this one event tipped the balance, with one theory being that it was due to the fact Judy Garland died earlier that week. Seriously. Because apparently all queens go crazy when an icon dies. As Bob Kohler explains, “When people talk about Judy Garland’s death having anything much to do with the riot, that makes me crazy. The street kids faced death every day. They had nothing to lose. And they couldn’t have cared less about Judy. We’re talking about kids who were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Judy Garland was the middle-aged darling of the middle-class gays. I get upset about this because it trivializes the whole thing.” Really, is it so difficult to find an explanation here? People being systematically persecuted don’t really enjoy it. The dam finally burst, and it was bound to happen sooner or later, especially given the other civil rights movements and general unrest that permeated late 1960s America.

Instead of going quietly during the Stonewall raid, women and men started yelling throwing objects at the officers. The police were entirely caught off guard by this, as was New York at large. The gay community was not “supposed to” fight back. The riot, while not extremely violent, still lasted for hours and forced officers to take refuge inside the very bar they raided. After a while, and with the assistance of reinforcements, the crowd was scattered. But the unrest did not end there. The night of June 28, less than 24 hours later, a larger crowd gathered and protested again. Riots and protests of varying intensity continued through the first week of July. It seemed unbelievable to the rest of the city and country, as it was an accepted matter of course for so many non-LGBT individuals that gays and lesbians would just accept the discrimination handed out to them. The newspaper coverage of the event is filled with headlines such as “Homo Nest Raided! Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad!” (courtesy of the Daily News) or “Police Again Rout ‘Village’ Youths” (courtesy of The New York Times with ‘Village’ a synonym for ‘homosexual’).

In the wake of Stonewall, the entire tenor of the gay rights movement changed. Places such as Greenwich Village, and the Castro district in San Francisco, became havens for open, out-and-proud activism on a scale that had been unimaginable just a few years earlier. The first ever gay pride parade was held on the one-year anniversary of the riots, and four decades later the exact date or the month of June is still used for the pride parades for New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and many more. The name “Stonewall” is a kind of shorthand for gay rights (and can be twisted, such as by an organization called Stonewall Revisited that urges gays and lesbians to choose Christianity over homosexuality). June was officially dubbed LGBT Pride Month by President Obama, following the earlier proclamation of it as Gay Pride Month by President Clinton.

It’s difficult to quantify exactly how much progress has been made in the past forty years. There have been innumerable setbacks and innumerable strides forward. For every Proposition 8 that breaks hearts, there are the actions of states such as Iowa and Massachusetts that do the right thing. Referenda in states such as Arkansas have banned gay couples from adopting. Gays are banned from serving openly in the military. Homosexuality is still a punch-line in mainstream entertainment. People can point to the fact that more public figures are “out” than could ever be imagined forty years ago (Ian McKellen, Rachel Maddow, Ellen DeGeneres, etc.), but a better barometer in my mind is the fact that there are still millions of people who think LGBT relationships, to say nothing of gay marriage, is immoral. There is still endless work to be done. Forty years out from Stonewall, there has been progress and there have been setbacks. Here’s hoping that when we reach the fifty-year mark in 2019, there will be even more progress to celebrate.

FURTHER READING

These are some of the best books I’ve read on American/NYC LGBT life, both pre, and post, and during the Stonewall era.

]]>http://www.harpyness.com/2009/06/26/remembering-stonewall/feed/12This Is What I Call Progresshttp://www.harpyness.com/2009/05/24/this-is-what-i-call-progress/
http://www.harpyness.com/2009/05/24/this-is-what-i-call-progress/#commentsSun, 24 May 2009 22:00:56 +0000http://www.harpyness.com/?p=6923I know this has been covered by several other sites today, but I still wanted to dedicate a short post to the internal State Department memo written by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announcing the extension of benefits to the same-sex partners of Foreign Service officers. There is no word on when it will take effect, but this kind of progress is very heartening. So much of the recent mainstream debate about gay rights has been focused on same-sex marriage at the expense of recognizing how much work needs to be done to advance equality in the realm of things like partnership benefits and job discrimination.

Secretary Clinton has previously said, “I view this as an issue of workplace fairness, employee retention, and the safety and effectiveness of our embassy communities worldwide.” But the extension of benefits had previously been denied by those who invoked the Defense of Marriage Act that limits federal recognition of any kind of same-sex partnership. The effects of benefit extension would cover areas like “diplomatic passports, use of medical facilities at overseas posts, medical and other emergency evacuation, transportation between posts, and training in security and languages” — all things that are currently available to partners of heterosexual Foreign Service officers. Additionally, it could change the extant policy where “diplomats with domestic partners could be evacuated from a hazardous country by the American government while their partners were left behind.” Hopefully this will go through soon and survive any legislative challenges that might possibly arise.

Russian law explicitly defines marriage as being between a man and a woman. This is not really a shock, given just how well-entrenched the patriarchy is in Russian society, and it’s not as if things are so much better in 46 of the 50 states here in my home country of America. So I have to give a shout-out to Irina Fedotova and Irina Shipitko for marching into a government office and calmly asking for a marriage license. They were denied, as was to be expected, but that doesn’t detract from their attempt to show that marriage laws should be changed in Russia — a country that only decriminalized homosexuality in 1993.

The current state of affairs in Russia is such that any attempt at gay rights within society is swiftly shut down. A planned gay pride parade for this Saturday in Moscow has been banned, although organizers say it will still go on as planned. The parade has prompted such responses as “the gay parade is … an act of spiritual terrorism,” from Mikhail Nalimov, chairman of the Union of Orthodox Christian Youth. Oh yes, and Nalimov’s deputy has said that the parade is really just an attempt to convert people to the gay side. Mayor Yury Luzhkov doesn’t hesitate to go further, saying that the parade would be “Satanic”.

One reason this is so compelling to me is not merely that I’m bisexual and passionate about this issue, but I’m also part-Russian and my mother’s family has an intense love-hate relationship with the country. We love our heritage, but my Grandpa Buddy still holds a grudge about his parents being forced from their homes by the deadly pre-Revolution pogroms that were designed to kill and oppress the Jewish population. The rate of violence and discrimination against gays in Russia is the new acceptable form of discrimination, and even The Moscow Times notes that “casual homophobia is widespread in Russia”. (The article also features an incredibly lovely picture of Fedotova and Shipitko.) I’m not about to stand here and pretend that the state of gay rights in America is anywhere near where it should be, but I’m also not going to pretend that Russia’s attitude towards gay rights is at all acceptable. Things need to change, and I hope the pride parade goes off without a hitch this weekend.

]]>http://www.harpyness.com/2009/05/12/to-russia-with-love/feed/9A Free Pass on Discriminationhttp://www.harpyness.com/2009/05/03/a-free-pass-on-discrimination/
http://www.harpyness.com/2009/05/03/a-free-pass-on-discrimination/#commentsSun, 03 May 2009 14:30:18 +0000http://www.harpyness.com/?p=5896A lawsuit filed by two 16-year-old girls has hit a dead end after the California Supreme Court declined to review the case. The suit was based on the girls’ expulsion from California Lutheran School in Riverside County because they had “bond of intimacy” that was “characteristic of a lesbian relationship.” That was enough for the girls to get the boot, and apparently not enough justification for the Court to think the case was worth hearing.

The suit had previously been ruled on by an appeals court, and the decision stated that state laws about discrimination did not apply to the school because it was not a business. This is the same legal principal used to deny the suit filed against the Boy Scouts of America by a gay man who had been similarly discriminated against. Because the school is based on a religious entity, there are some who see this as a just application of the separation of church and state, but it galls me that the right to be free of discrimination stops at the doors of a school, whether it be a religious or secular one. I’m curious to know what those Harpyness readers who have knowledge of the law have to say about this. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.

I was hankering for something to sink my teeth into today, and my fellow harpy Pilgrim Soul dangled some red meat in front of me in the form of this Salon feature in which an anonymous conservative explains why he is opposed to gay marriage.

It starts off with a reader writing a letter asking why conservatives are so virulently against gay marriage: “I am gay and monogamous and am raising kids with my partner of five years, so my perspective is skewed. It would just really help me out to be able to get married. I’m not thinking about ruining the game for anyone else. I just want to join. ” But the conservative, writing under the pseudonym “Glenallen Walker” thinks that the gay folk are totally trying to ruin the game. And he has, like, completely intellectual reasons for this! These reasons are founded on those bedrocks of conservativism: states’ rights and no government intrusion into personal affairs. Oh wait, sorry! Wrong bedrocks! Those would actually seem to support same-sex marriage. Instead, Walker falls back on the same tired arguments that have been used to keep gays from destroying the social fabric of our civilization marrying for the past few years, and manages to piss me the hell off in the process.

[T]he opposition to gay marriage is not motivated, as a general rule, in large part or small, by bigotry. I am aware there are many gay-marriage advocates who refuse to accept that there really can be a legitimate difference of viewpoint on the issue.

Yes, and those who opposed women’s suffrage totally weren’t misogynists, they just had a legitimate difference of viewpoint on the ability of women’s feeble brains to elect the right person! (You never knew when some silly woman would submit a write-in vote for Babar the Elephant.) And those people who opposed the Civil Rights Act had nothing against Black people — they just needed to make sure white men were not being shaken from the top of the status quo. That is not the same as racism!

Here’s the cold, hard truth: being against gay marriage means, as an unbreakable rule, that you want to deny equal rights to LGBT individuals. Equal rights. Not greater rights, equal rights. You want to deny them access to the exact same construct of marriage that you enjoy, regardless of whether or not you believe that construct is secularly of religiously dictated. You can say your bigotry is founded on religion or history if it makes you feel better, but it is bigotry and it is homophobia. Deal with it.

I don’t mean marriage as we have come to believe it should be — two starry-eyed people mooning over each other, in love forever — but marriage as the best way to establish an enduring relationship between adults to best protect the interests of children and, to some degree, women. Marriage established a mechanism for the training and upbringing of children and provided for the disposition of familial assets in ways that protected the property rights of those who had a share in creating the assets in the first place.

So why aren’t you focused on outlawing divorce? Wouldn’t that really protect the so-called “sanctity of marriage”? And let’s not pretend that marriage did anything to protect women’s assets for thousands of years, and in some places still does no such thing but is instead used as a way of holding a woman in possession.

Over two millennia society has concluded that the best way to do that is a sanctioned relationship between a man and a woman. And conservatives, as a general rule, have an interest in conserving those traditions.

Which explains why I always see Newt Gingrich, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, Rick Warren, Michael Steele, and their ilk on CNN decrying polygamy, the FLDS, and marriages in which the “woman” is an 8-year-old. Oh wait, I’ve never seen that.

Religious conservatives also have another fear, one that I think is legitimate. They’re afraid that a change in the civil code will force a change in religious institutions.

This is especially funny because religious conservatives never give two shits about religious codes forcing a change in civil institutions. Separation of church and state: this thing exists. Sometimes it feels like it only exists in theory (thank you, President Bush!) but it is Constitutional law. Hey, remember how the Bible sanctioned slavery and people were all up in that, saying that emancipation would be an infringement on Scripture giving slaveowners the OK to treat humans as chattel? Guess what — the law changed and the religious institutions survived. And let’s please not pretend that slavery is an institution that’s any younger than marriage. (I have a feeling that some people might even equate the two in certain circumstances.)

There is precedent for this, as in the way Henry VIII threatened the churches in England after his divorce from Catherine of Aragon.

Really? Henry VIII? That’s your precedent? Wow.

While agnostic on the idea of whether it is a good or bad thing, they take exception to the fact that a few unelected judges in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts took it upon themselves to make this an issue that every American had to deal with.

I notice he doesn’t mention the elected Vermont legislature that effected the same change. Maybe that doesn’t count?

I am aware that Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s unsuccessful presidential campaign, came out last week in favor of ending the GOP’s opposition to gay marriage. But I question the wisdom of adopting political strategies proposed by the fellow who led a losing GOP national campaign, one that rejected conservative values as a general rule, and that couldn’t even win in a state like Virginia, which went to the Democrats for the first time since 1964.

And yet I get the feeling that even if McCain had won the election, this clown still would “question the wisdom” of following Schmidt’s lead. Not to mention that rejecting conservative “values” (oh how I hate that one little word) is not why McCain lost the election in the first place. Apparently McCain lost Virginia because he appeased the gays or something like that. For the love of all that is holy, did this man read any election coverage last year?

As conservative writer, talk-show host and lesbian Tammy Bruce says, “Gays ultimately need to stop looking to government for unconditional love and approval of who we are.” Looking to government to force states to legitimize gay marriage, Bruce continues, “gives the government and other people’s opinions far too much power over the quality of our lives and effectively eliminates our own responsibility for our happiness.”

This is mind-numbingly tortuous “logic.” The fact is that LGBT discrimination is written into the law of every state that forbids same-sex marriage (which, if you’re keeping count, is 46 of the 50) simply by prohibiting that equal right. So there is already a system in place that gives “government and other people’s opinions far too much power over the quality of [LGBT people's] lives.”

Apparently LGBT people should not include marriage in their definition of happiness, and should just concentrate on other things that might make them happy, like, uh, putting together fabulous window-dressings and having group sex in bathhouses and watching Project Runway. (We think this is what gay people do. We’re too afraid to actually talk to them and ask them.) Marriage is totally in the straight definition of happiness, but the gays should just forget it and don’t look to the government to “love” you at all, let alone “approve” of you! Approve of yourself, and approve of the government not giving you equal rights. That’s the conservative way. That’s the American way. That’s the Glenallen Walker way.

I hope that helps.

Actually, Mr. Walker, you did help me! I had a splitting headache before reading this, but then you made me bang my head against the wall in frustration so many times that everything has magically gone numb. Well done.

CNN’s Lola Ogunnaike reports a story about the first gay marriage on a network soap; last week’s union of Erika Kane’s daughter Bianca to her paramour Reese on “All My Children.” The happy occasion was as full of bigass flower arrangements, cheesy self-written vows and soft-focus money shots as every soap wedding that came before it (and check out Bianca’s odd, bedazzled toga-gown, which looks like it came from a yard sale on the back lot of HBO’s “Rome.”) Unlike the first gay network marriage, of two men on “Roseanne”, which came with arch nods and winks, pink triangles and a huge picture of Judy Garland over the altar, this wedding was played completely straight, and demanded the same envious sighs from the viewer as any other romantic wedding.

Mainstream entertainment has been inching towards acceptance for a while now, but to my mind this is as radical as People putting Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi’s wedding on their cover. Both People and “All My Children”‘s core audience is not the coastal, liberal, gay-accepting reader/viewer—although they are certainly represented—but the more conservative, church-going middle Americans to whom gay marriage is still culturally scandalous and politically anathema.

Of course, it would have been really revolutionary if the married couple was male.The marriage of two beautiful, feminine women doesn’t provoke the same kind of knee-jerk discomfort–let alone outrage–as the marriage of two handsome, masculine men would (Clive Owen and Daniel Craig, anyone?Anyone?)But it’s a big step nonetheless, and as an increasingly rabid supporter of gay marriage, I give big props to the producers of “All My Children.”

And “mazel tov” to Reese and Bianca.They’re gonna need it, and not just because of the homophobes: as every soap fan knows, the course of true love never runs smooth—it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun for viewers.